It had been her first gris-gris. She’d never known if it had even worked — at the least, in all her years, there had never been any evidence it had worked. But it could be so hard to tell …

Just a piece of her beloved husband, that was all she’d wanted. A child, a rebirth, some way to be sure he had left something behind in the world.

Phoebe [lastname] glared at the outbreak parameters on the big wall screen, displaying an area topographical map, of the Incident Room. Right between two major metro areas, and in close proximity to two more — this had the potential to shape into a major disaster. The last time anything looked this bad, it had turned out to be a mentally disabled pyrokinetic who had drawn sympathetic fires across acres of Southern California. That area seemed to breed such people.

She hoped the team would be able to shut down this incident before it got that out of hand. The public only found out about the ones that got out of hand, and Phoebe wanted to keep it that way.

She paused in her typing to finger the crucifix around her neck. “Áve María, grátia pléna,” she whispered, continuing to add tracking information to the map onscreen. With this kind of potential for a zombie outbreak, no lesser Saint would do to petition. Maybe she’d stop by the Church on the way home and light a few candles.

Felice Helios drummed her fingers against the desktop, watching the map data flow in. This looked ugly. They were going to have to start out shooting just to clear enough room to find the zero site. At the rate sightings were multiplying, it was enough to make one believe in the movie version of zombies, who could spread by biting.

Fortunately, no voudon or spellcaster or anyone else had ever been able to pull that off, not in hundreds of cases in hundreds of years. Records from before the [group] was sanctioned by church or state or any law down through history packed the archives at the Alexandria Tower, the oldest ones carefully preserved from time’s ravages by means magical and mundane.

Of course, [group]’s activities were much freer now with full governmental backing, and the sanction of several different religions was a major boon as well. Aversion of incidents didn’t count, apparently, but stopping a major incident in its tracks was a major demonstration of worthiness. Felice’s lips twisted. It was hard to accept the fact that [group] would never get good reviews — the ones they stopped vanished in the smoke haze created by news of the ones they didn’t.

And this one shaped up badly. The rate of appearances indicated someone out there with power to burn and a real grudge. Location meant it might be a soldier with PTSD, or a soldier’s child, meaning a struggle with the military over jurisdiction. The local LEO hadn’t reported an increase in violence or the murder rate, though, so nobody on the team could fiigure out where the power was coming from.

Re-animation by itself wasn’t really all that hard. Life called to life. The surprise was that the ability didn’t turn up more often. But the voudons guarded their secrets carefully and tended not to share them with other spellcasters, and the inborn ability /was/ rare. No, the hard part was continuing to raise the dead. Over and over and over. A single zombie wasn’t all that useful, especially if you got an old body (the chances for that were pretty high, too). No, it usually took a group, a shamble, of zombies to accomplish anything. Of course, most of the time re-animation only occurred when information was required, which meant a shamble of zombies wasn’t raised.

When you started getting shambles, you had a problem. Uncontrolled zombies were violent; life called to life, but the souls didn’t often want to leave their afterlives — and those that did were generally the violent type. Controlled zombies were pretty easy to deal with; you just persuaded the re-animator to put them back, which usually wasn’t that hard.

Uncontrolled zombies tended to wander all over the place, wreaking havoc, and the only way to lay them was to either get them back into the physical presence of the re-animator, who then had to re-establish control and THEN lay them — or you had to blow them to tiny bits. Which didn’t go over well with the local LEOs or the relatives.

These were either uncontrolled zombies, or whomever had re-animated them had told them to wreak havoc anyway. Which amounted to the same thing, right now — a huge shamble of zombies, carrying trouble with them like the plague.

Over half the team was going to have to be devoted to round-up and containment, Felice decided. That meant Phoebe and Noel were only going to have one field agent to work with, and it was going to have to be Rico. There was no way the team could spare anyone with more experience, but it was going to be a rough time for the kid.

The room was silent as Phoebe finished marking out the current range of the zombies’ spread. Felice heard an audible gulp and the slap of a hand against the back of a head. “Cut it out,” she said, turning to face the rest of the team. “we’ve got a situation here, right enough, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Rico, you’re with Phoebe and Noel; find me the zero site. The rest of you, you’re with me on containment. Before we go out there, get a refresh of the zombie procs on your smartphone from Phoebe.”

She stopped for a moment to lay a hand on the Catholic woman’s shoulder. “It’s in your hands, this time, Phoebe, yours and Noel’s. Without that zero site, all we can do is stem the tide.”

Phoebe laid her cheek against the back of Felice’s hand, her usual acknowledgement, and continued typing. Code rolled across the focused window, and Felice moved on, satisfied.

She strained her attention through the ash- and smoke-filled air toward the city, but could only make out hazy outlines of rubble. It looked like nothing in the city was left intact, and that even the Palace, built with the best possible engineering to withstand everything the Great Mother Goddess could throw at it, had taken massive damage. She could no longer see the Tower of [something].

If she had been in a real body of her own, she would have been in tears. The helplessness was driving her mad. But she forced herself to watch, to try to see it all, though as the ashfall continued to increase there was less and less she could see.

The lava flow crawled within a few feet of her position, and her host body abruptly leapt up and began to run down toward the city, stumbling and tripping, in abject and unthinking flight. They dodged through several interconnecting valleys, all filled with fire and ash. A few, branching upward, were filled with creeping molten rock, and as they rounded the back of the Palace Calixte noticed that more and more valleys were filled with a jumbled mass of tree trunks, rocks, and mud, and less and less with lava. The mud, too, crept downward, engulfing all in its path, and it seemed there was little choice between the two deaths.

The host body emerged, stopping short, on the edge of the [slab] on which the Palace was perched above the city, and some trick of the air currents provided a clear corridor down to the sea. The sun’s light was still blocked by the smoke and ash clouding above, but Calixte could see the blank, wreckage-strewn sand of the harbour, and far in the distance the towering wave that would complete the destruction of the city. Death loomed from all sides, encroaching on the few safe places people had found.

Her host body seemed to think it had found one of those rare safe places, backing away from the precipice and falling to its knees, gasping for breath. Calixte turned her attention frantically around, hoping against hope for some kind of miracle, some way to stay the final blow. Surely, surely, if the city could be saved at all everything could be rebuilt. If the city fell to the oncoming wave, or was engulfed by the creeping lava, all would be lost. She refused to consider what might happen if the two met.

So far, this precipice seemed to be untouched, as the copse before had been, by destruction. She could look upward and see the mountain, oddly scooped out looking now, still spouting fire and ash from its summit, or look downward and see the wave inexorably approaching. Helplessly trapped, guiltily observing, for Calixte time seemed to simultaneously crawl and hurry, as the two awesome forces rushed toward one another.

The enormous wave, its surface seething and boiling, arched up over the city, throwing the already dim light into even deeper shadow. Arms of molten rock had already crept down through the city streets, spreading between and over every building and blocking every street, and everything flammable was in flames.

Everything seemed to hold its breath for a long, long moment, silence enveloping the doomed city. Nothing moved, no smoke rose, no lava sparked, no ash fell. The rumble of the erupting mountain, the thunder of the encroaching wave, the crackle of the fires, all seemed silent or distant.

The wave fell.

The devastated city vanished under a roil of water. Steam exploded upward, obscuring what little view was left. Calixte could see, as the water fled inland, uphill, swirling and catching up debris, sprays of molten rock combined with water flashing into more steam. The air grew even more unbearably hot, and she could feel her host body struggling for breath.

A wild gust of air swept aside some of the hanging cloud of debris and steam, and her last view of the city – the rubble of the city, glorious and fallen – was the second wave of the tsunami sweeping onshore and pushing the water from the first wave so far into the city it reached the down-thrust arms of molten rock.

As the two elemental forces contacted one another, a final, air-ripping explosion threw chunks of stone high into the sky. Her host body hunkered down on the edge of the cliff, hands clapped over ears, breathing harshly in air that seemed not to carry any life any more. Numerous smaller explosions dotted the far edges of the rubble, spitting chunks of rock and unidentifiable objects into the air.

Calixte wanted to scream. She wanted to cry, to bang her head on the rock, to curse the gods at the height of her voice. She wanted to hurl herself into the water, into the fires, into the molten rock. She wanted to die with her people, as her pride and selfishness condemned them to oblivion and devastation. She wanted to be anywhere but in this body that was not hers to command, watching helplessly and of her own will as everything she’d ever cared for and everything she’d ever known vanished under the onslaught of wrath.

Ash, steam, and smoke closed in around ‘her’ body again, but Calixte didn’t try to peer through the muck this time. Her world had ended in fire and water, and a depression more profound than night enveloped her. It was time to die. Survival no longer meant anything. For what had she struggled, for what had she fought, for what had she made her treacherous way through the labyrinth of the Fair Folk’s land? For this? For hubris?

Her host body stood up, smoke-borne tears making runnels through the grime on its face. She knew nothing about this body. What did it look like? What gender was it, even? She’d been so absorbed in finding out what was going on in her city, she’d neglected to even care.

Too late.

They spread their arms wide, as Icarus preparing to soar to the sun. There was no sun. There was only the smoke, the ash, the fire, the water, the rock.

They spread their arms wide, and leaned forward. Forward. Everything seemed to fall away, and then they were racing down a long, pale tunnel that flashed and swirled around them. The choking wind streamed past.

Blackness.

Epilogue

Calixte sat with her head in her hands, honey-dark curls spilling down to hide her face. “Why did you save me?” she asked into the table.

“Are you kidding?” the Sorceress asked. “You’re the only person to face down the king of the Fair Folk and survive!”

Calixte exploded off the bench, turning on the Sorceress in a flash of fury. “He destroyed my entire city in retaliation, you bitch! How can you /say/ that? Gods of my ancestors, yes, /I/ survived, and everyone I’d ever known and a good many people I didn’t know paid for that!” She dropped back on to the bench, deflated. “I wanted to die with them. Why didn’t you let me die?”

~~~

Calixte groaned and started to sit up, then put her hand to the back of her head and winced, lying back down. The ground was cold, bare, and hard, and a chill breeze was whistling through something nearby. She opened her eyes a slit, trying to make out where she was.

The last thing she remembered was … was what? There was a mad jumble of memories in the forefront of her mind; painting, Ishan, Vidatha, the Sorceress, the king of the Fair Folk, Atlantis … the court of the Fair Folk collapsing around her.

Columns crumbling, mad explosions of growth ripping up chucks of marble from the floor, benches and chairs weathering as of years all in a moment, fabrics decaying and shredding, animals of the forest invading. The Fair Folk wailing and shrieking. Their king … their king ageing years, before her eyes, from young and vibrant and powerful to a husk of a man, stooped and grey and withered. Feeble. Powerless.

Overwhelmed by his own court. Calixte remembered a frenzied blur of motion as she toppled backward, numb and frightened and somehow immune to the [mad] decay happening all around her. A swirling blur of colour engulfed the king, his feeble screams rising out of the whirl, and then as darkness began to overwhelm her vision she remembered seeing streams of colours fleeing the encroaching devastation, and a pitiful, stripped heap of bones in the centre of a last, untouched square of marble.

The horror of it jerked her eyes open, and the first thing her sight landed on was that pile of bones, white and weathered and bare. She screamed, flinging herself across the broken stone, as far away as possible. Holding her hand over her pounding heart, she tried to slow her breathing down, staring at the bones like she was afraid they would get up and move.

Here, they might. Take no chances.

A few minutes passed, and she began to feel calm enough to take a closer look around. While she was clearly still in the great hall of the court of the Fair Folk, it looked as though it had been deserted for several hundred years. Moss and ivy grew over the stonework, the throne was worn and rounded, every marble tile had cracks through it except the one on which the bones rested, there was no trace of any of the banners or tapestries. The roof was gone, and most of the pillars were toppled to the ground. A few enterprising trees had rooted and begun to grow amongst the rubble.

So what had happened? She turned her hands up, examining them closely, suddenly afraid that whatever explosion of time had happened here had affected her too. But they seemed the same as ever, and when she pulled a handful of honey-dark hair over her shoulder she couldn’t find any white strands.

Calixte froze, poised on the edge of an overhang on the tallest island mountain in the Circling Sea. One minute she was peering into a deep forest pool under the guidance of [name2], the next she was apparently about to fall off the tallest cliff known to her people. She tried to breathe very shallowly, lest she topple.

Faintly and far away, she heard [name2] and Vidatha, calling her name. “You can’t fall!”

Easy for them to say. They weren’t the ones standing on the edge of the cliff! She glanced up, out to where she thought Atlantis was, and sucked in breath so hard she choked. Coughing so hard her eyes teared, she wrapped her arms around her middle and tried to remember how to breathe. When her vision cleared, she was back in the forest, surrounded by [stuff here].

“Are you okay?” [name2] asked.

“Atlantis,” she gasped. “The whole island … it’s on fire! Send me back! Send me there, I have to do something!”

Vidatha knelt behind her, peering into the pool. “We can’t send /you/ there, only your spirit. The best it can be is you as a helpless observer, riding in someone else’s body. Someone who is sure to die, with you still riding along. It could be,” he hesitated, then finished with masterful understatement, “bad. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Calixte looked at him, eyes full of anguish. “I caused this. I have to be there. Somehow. Anyhow. It doesn’t matter. Send me back.”

“Calixte, the shock of being in someone else’s dying body could kill you.”

“Do it, Vidatha!”

With what felt like an audible snap, she was back on the height of the cliff, and this time her gaze tracked unerringly to the far island. Just in time, as a dizzying spiral of inertialess motion seemed to pull her down and toward the climbing column of smoke. Her insubstantial spirit shot through the city streets, filled with hurrying, busy folk, and she was shocked to notice that no one seemed panicked at all.

Then she was slammed into one of the moving bodies, and everything went away for a moment.

When her awareness returned, she was apparently moving at an easy pace along the main avenue. She tried to glance around, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t in her own body, and mentally stumbled at the lack of response. Reorienting herself, she directed her awareness around her, trying to learn how to obtain information in a body she didn’t control.

Abruptly, the earth underneath ‘her’ feet trembled. A few shrieks rang out around her, and she noticed the [haste] of the people around her redoubled. Earthquakes were common enough; everyone typically knew what to do in a quake.

So what had caused the smoke?

Another tremor rolled the earth beneath ‘her’ feet, and this time it was strong enough to cause her host body to stumble. A third rumble drew a zigzag crack along the width of the street, and the movements of folk around her took on a frenzied pace. Calixte understood why.

No earthquake in Atlantis’ five hundred year written history had been strong enough to damage the city. The city was designed to withstand everything the Great Mother Goddess could throw at it, from flood to fire to quake. An earthquake strong enough to damage the main avenue was of unfathomable strength.

And no earthquake caused the land to smoke.

As her host body wended its way through the city, she realised they were heading for the outskirts, and inland. She turned her attention upward, and soon spotted the column of smoke, now visibly thicker and darker. Inland was safer, if the ocean became enraged by the shaking of the land. But that smoke frightened her more than anything in her life ever had.

Masses of people, many of them weighted with heavy packs or precious treasures, now streamed toward the fertile hills surrounding the city’s harbour. Her host body was carried along with them. Calixte could almost taste the fear in the air. There were no plans to cope with the city falling apart under their feet.

As they neared the higher points of the hills, the tremors increased in strength and frequency, until they were as much being flung forward by the ripples as they were actually walking, and many were running. Most of the houses along the street and for several past were seamed with cracks, and so were the streets. Screaming broke out ahead, and she turned her thoughts that way in time to see two or three people … vanish.

The screaming intensified, and people were stumbling backward, and now she could see, by virtue of the height of her host body, that an enormous gaping crack had opened across the roadway, apparently right under the feet of the folk who had vanished. The earth had swallowed them whole. Around her she could hear the prayers, always sent up in times of catastrophe, change in tone and form, as people stopped asking the gods for help and began to beg to be saved from certain death.

They detoured down smaller and smaller streets, reaching the familiar bare alleyways. Calixte saw several of her murals, religious and secular. Most of them were cracked, faded, derelict. She spotted one, a wing-spread depiction of mythical dragons, which was now missing a large chunk near its top. Another step along the street, and she spotted the missing piece – and a small hand flung out from underneath the huge block of stone.

Anguished, she pulled her attention away. But more and more along the streets the ranks of fleeing folk were being thinned by falling stonework and dangerous cracks in the earth. Crushed up against several buildings near those cracks, she saw ominously still bodies, bodies with no mark on them. What could have caused that, she wondered.

At last, the crowd began to pour our of the narrow alleyways and into the climbing valleys wending their way through the hills. Overhead, the sky was beginning to be noticeably darkened by the thickening smoke, and she fretted at the mystery of it. People began to disperse among the valleys, seeking safety away from the stone buildings in the heights.

The tremors seemed to be weakening, and Calixte wondered if perhaps the event was over.

Then an enormous BOOM rolled across the land, and she realised with despair that the catastrophe was just beginning. Fire seemed to shoot into the sky, and the smoke increased in density again, obscuring the sky and clouding vision in the valleys. The whole world seemed to shake, over and over, accompanied by ear-splitting explosive noises, continual fountains of fire, and a blast of scalding air.

Her host body had frozen in shock and terror, cowering in a copse of trees, at the first huge noise, and at first Calixte didn’t notice the falling flakes. They were grey, fine, like the ash of a fire. Ash? Ash was falling from the sky? Soon the ash was accompanied by tiny sparks of fire, most of which landed and swiftly winked out.

But not all. Calixte’s horror grew, as more and more of the falling sparks set tiny fires, fires which grew, and consumed, and grew together. Soon there were small fires everywhere she turned her attention, dotting the valley and blistering the air.

Then the flaming rocks began to fall from the sky, which was so dark now as to resemble the depths of the night, and screaming, burning, terrified people erupted from the valleys above and fled back toward the city. Already her host body had climbed to such a height that she could turn her attention down over most of the by-now collapsed roofs of the city, saving only the Palace, into the harbour.

Dozens of ships, she saw, were stranded on bare sand and rock. The ocean had retreated far back from the city, and she could barely make out a far, far curl of water.

Tsunami. The earth-shaking rage of the Great Mother Goddess had caused the sea to draw back from the land, and before long, it would come rushing back, streaming far inland, drowning and crushing all in its path.

Fire. Flood. Earthquake. What other disaster could befall her beloved city?

Above her, the burning mountain seemed determined to provide an answer to her anguished question. As though determined to outdo all previous efforts, a clap of sound mightier than any other yet before rolled across the tremor-wracked island, and the entire top of the mountain exploded in a rain of flaming, molten rocks, ash, and smoke. Body-sized chunks of stone, glowing red and streaming steam, thudded to the ground, burning and crushing all in their paths as they tumbled down.

The copse of trees where her host body had stopped seemed miraculously untouched by all the disasters so far; no fire bloomed in its branches, nor cracks slashed the ground. Calixte hoped the tsunami would not be powerful enough to smash this far up, but it was a faint hope and she knew it. And what might happen when the chill waters of the sea hit the burning rocks? Would the fires be extinguished, or would something even more catastrophic happen?

She turned her attention back up the hillside, and her heart seemed to leap into her throat as an ominous rumble reached her ears. Around a curve of crumbling rock, an angry red glow appeared, followed by a wide ribbon of molten rock. It oozed slowly, inexorably pouring over all that stood in its path, and as she watched, it seemed even the apparently slow motion was a deception. The burning stone engulfed the last stragglers of the people attempting to return to the city via this valley, rolling them under. Tiny fires seemed to flare in the very air itself as the heat of the oncoming rock ignited the falling ash.

Calixte thought she had been horrified before. Had this been her body, she would have been on her knees, prostrate and ill with terror. It was as if the gods had gone mad, ripping the island of Atlantis to shreds, but she knew better.

This was the wrath of the king of the Fair Folk. This, her pride had wrought, or his; the destruction of her home, her people, her land. Everything she had loved was falling to this onslaught of the worst nature had to offer. Calamity upon calamity, brought upon innocent people, guilty of nothing but the crime of being her people.

“I will give you a guide,” the old man said firmly. “The rest will be up to you.”

She bent over, studying the map with all her might. As many details as possible impressed to memory could only be helpful in the long run. Looking at the distance she had apparently already crossed, and comparing it with the distance she had yet to cross, over unfamiliar terrain, she felt the beginnings of despair.

She had lost so much! She didn’t even know how much. Her name, surely, and though she felt a new sense of self, she didn’t know how much of that was true to whomever she had been – and surely she had been someone. Surely she had not appeared, new-born and tabula rasa, in the forest only that morning. Too many things continually bubbled to the surface of thought for that.

Knowledge and memory. How much of it defined /her/? Was she her name?

Vidatha slid a tangle of leather, string and crystal over the map. She picked it up and it resolved into a spiral of webbing enclosing a chunk of crystal, depending from a loop of brightly braided threads. “This is … ?”

“Your guide.”

Parivrit eyed it dubiously. It looked more like a child’s adornment than any kind of lodestar. Would it take her to the Sorceress’ house?

On the thought, a bright sparkle flashed in the crystal, and a white line wisped across her vision for a brief moment. She dropped it hastily. As soon as the thing left her hand, the lights faded, and it was as quiescent as before.

She looked up to see that Vidatha was rummaging among the scrolls again, and asked, “How does it work?”

“What? Oh,” he waved a hand vaguely in the air, “You just think about where you want to go, and it shows you the way. Quite simple, really.” A heap of scrolls tumbled to the floor with a papery slither. Parivrit jumped up, forgetting that her feet were numb to the knees, and crashed to the floor herself.

“My goodness, child, don’t do that!” Vidatha hurried over to Parivrit, sprawled on the wood planking, and bodily pulled her back onto the bench. “You just sit there quietly. Practise with the guide, or study the map, or something.”

Obediently, Parivrit bent her head back over the map, honey-dark curls falling around her face. The warmth, lack of pain, and food were combining to recreate the muzzy numbness of earlier in the night. Her eyelids drooped closed, and she slept.

“Who are you?” Parivrit gasped, trying to keep up.

A clash of merry laughter greeted her question. “Keep up, keep up! Don’t ask a dryad her name!”

Trees whirled by as the dryad pulled Parivrit faster and faster, and she wondered how they weren’t hitting anything – no branches, leaves, or trunks smashed into her, though they were travelling faster than any horse she had ever been on. She began to feel queasy, and closed her eyes, praying incoherently that it would be over soon.

A sudden blast of cooler air smacked her in the face, and involuntarily she flinched. All movement abruptly ceased, and she was left swaying sickly in a space that somehow felt wide open and exposed. She dared to open one eye, then the other, and saw a field of pale grass stretching out seemingly endlessly before her, hazy in the setting sun. She wanted to scuttle back into the forest, which felt safer.

The dryad. Where was she? Parivrit whirled around, and caught the wave of a slender hand as the girl disappeared back into the leaves. “Goodbye! Don’t forget!” came faintly back.

Don’t forget. Parivrit firmed her lips. She might have forgotten her own name, her own past, but this she would remember. Turning back to the endless plains, she marked the position of the sun and forged forward into the long grass.

Before long she was far out among the swaying stems, hip deep in tasselled seed heads. A slightly wobbly track of trampled stems marked her path, and the forest was little more than a smudge staining the far horizon. The sun had set, leeching much of the day’s warmth with it, and masses of stars, unfamiliar and cold, splashed the dark sky above.

Parivrit wondered if the moon would rise. Did this place have a moon? Should she stop for the night, or keep going? Her feet ached; she had no idea how far she had come but her body said ‘too far’. She stopped, turning in a slow circle, and saw nothing that looked like shelter.

Or water. As if awakening from a trance, she realised her lips and tongue were parched, and her belly added a rolling growl to the litany of complaints her body had. She wrapped both arms around her middle, as if that would still the hunger, and turned again.

Barely a hundred yards off, dim in the starlight, a timber-frame building loomed. Parivrit had no idea how she could have missed it before. Several windows cast faint light into the field, which now seemed to end a few feet from the building. She forged her way toward the light, wondering if she could possibly be lucky enough to be helped a third time in this strange land.

Maybe they followed her own customs and turned no man away.

She had to stop at the edge of the grass and examine that thought. Her customs? What customs? Obviously a custom of hospitality, and since the thought stood out obviously there were places where such a thought did not run. Were there other customs she could bring to mind? How did she know about that custom?

Another embarrassing and painful gurgle derailed that train of thought. Parivrit strode with all the confidence she could muster up to the door and knocked firmly. She could hear no sound from within, and glanced up at the sky worriedly. Perhaps it was too late and no one was awake to hear her? Or worse, perhaps she disturbed someone, who would then be angry.

Another one of those faint memory echoes suggested that having the person who lived here angry with her could be a very bad thing, and she began to feel frightened. The door opened a crack, and without waiting to see who, or what, answered, Parivrit offered a low bow. “Greetings, sir or madam,” she began.

A flood of firelight spilled over her as the door opened wide. “Gracious, child, get in here,” a gruff voice exclaimed. “It’s no kind of night for folks to be out without protection.”

Parivrit was only too glad to comply. The wooden floor beneath her bare feet was sanded silk-smooth, gleaming darkly in the firelight. The whole building was a single room, high-ceilinged and supported by gigantic crossbeams. A large fire, somehow supported off the floor, filled the room with light as a cup is filled with water, illuminating webs of intricate and detailed carvings covering seemingly every surface but the floor. One single wall, across from the door, was lined with scroll cubbies to the ceiling, with a precious few bound volumes, huge and faintly gleaming, sprinkled among them. A ladder leaned in one corner.

Parivrit turned to thank her benefactor, offering another bow. It turned out to be a tall, but stooped old man, sporting a thin white beard and tiny round lenses somehow perched on his nose. More white hair, turned yellow by the firelight, flowed over the shoulders of the sleeveless tunic he wore. He smiled gently and reached out to pat her on the shoulder.

“I almost forgot you were coming, child. These old thoughts don’t work so well any more, you know.” He urged her over closer to the fire, where there was a bench, well-padded with cushions. “Come along, let’s get you some food and you can sit down and let me tend to those feet.”

She allowed herself to be pushed down into the pile of cushions, and heaved an unintended sigh as soon as she sat down. With her weight off them, her legs began to ache with a vengeance, and she bit her lip and fought not to tense up.

The old man bustled about at a cupboard, and returned with a stone jar, which turned out to be full of some kind of sharp-smelling pale ointment. He offered it to her first, and she shook her head, too busy trying not to cry. How far had she walked, anyway? So he scooped a fingerful out of the jar and smeared it across the bottom of her right foot.

Parivrit closed her eyes against the sense of relief that overcame her. Where the ointment touched, the pain vanished, to be replaced by … nothing. She had to open her eyes to make sure her foot was still there. More and more of her legs seemed to vanish from her awareness as the old man worked his way up.

She would have been frightened, but with the cessation of pain came a floating detachment, a muzzy mental numbness that came between her and all emotions. She gazed into the firelight and drifted, seeing fantastic shapes form out of the flames. When the old man brought her a piece of bread laden with pale honey she smiled child-like up at him, forgetting everything the day had brought.

Hadn’t she been here forever?

“You can’t stay here, you know, child,” the old man said, settling down on another bench opposite hers and stretching his feet to the fire with a sigh of his own. Parivrit blinked, shocked out of reverie, and glanced down at the half-eaten slice. A smear of honey decorated one finger.

“Please, sir, I just wanted to stop for the night. I will be on my way in the morning.”

“Do you know where you’re going, child?” His voice was kindly, but the twinkle in his eyes – the blue of cobalt, she noticed suddenly – was disconcertingly sharp.

Parivrit blushed, and saved herself from answering by taking a large bite. A knowing smile crossed the old man’s face. “Of course not; and why should you?” He shook his head. “Just once, I wish that the Folk would think before they prey on humans,” he grumbled.

Parivrit frowned, wondering if she was supposed to hear that. “Prey?”

She didn’t realise she’d spoken out loud until he answered, “You can’t remember who you are, can you?” She shook her head slowly.

Fixing her eyes on his, she leaned forward. “Do you know who I am, sir?” Until just now, it hadn’t mattered; the world was beautiful and no harm had come to her. What need a name, the self? But prey. She didn’t want to be prey, and now it mattered.

He cackled. “Call me Vidatha, child. Oh, I know quite well who you are! Such a stir as you have caused in the great court already; all those who live in the lands of the Folk hereabouts know who you are. You’ve had help getting this far already,” he [clambered] to his feet, “and I’m here to set you on your further path.”

Vidatha. Scholar, she knew, though she couldn’t remember how she knew. That explained the scrolls. “Path, s—Vidatha?”

He ambled into the smoky haze near the wall of scrolls, but she could still hear him as clearly as when he was sitting across from her. “Eat that bread now, child. No sense starving yourself any more.” She could hear him muttering under his breath as he searched the scrolls. “Aha!” He plucked two scrolls from their cubbies and strode back toward her, somehow seeming much more spry abruptly.

“Now. I can’t answer all your questions, but I can answer some of them, and some answers you’ll need to know before I let you leave. Finish the bread.” He swept cushions off the bench and unrolled one scroll over the wood, pointing a finger at it firmly. “Stay.”

Obediently, Parivrit bit into the bread and honey, and watched the scroll obey his commands as willingly. A map lay in clear, colourful lines across the parchment, and she hunched over to peer more closely at it. It lay open to her gaze without any hand pressing it down.

Vidatha put one finger on a point near the far edge of the map. A wide swathe of green swept in a half-moon nearby, curving protectively around a wider patch of paler wheat colour. “Tonight, we are here.” Moving his finger across the map, he touched a star, which was nestled in encircling hills and backed by mountains. “This is the Court of the Fair Folk. You must avoid this place. Even armed with what I can give you, and what others may offer on the course of your journey, you’re no match for the combined wills of the Folk and their king.” Again, his eyes, bright in the firelight, were fixed on her. Parivrit nodded.

“Avoid the Court in the foothills of the mountains,” she repeated.

Another mark, equidistant from both previous locations, and on the far side of a spur of the mountains, he touched. “Here is where you must go. This is the home of [witch], the Sorceress. She is the only one with the power to challenge the king and his Court right now, and the only one who can truly help you. The rest of us may assist you on your way and guide you, but no one else in the lands can give you the assistance she can.”

It wasn’t Ista-sattva, as in a name, but /an/ ista-sattva, a type. One of many who could do the same thing.

One of the Folk.

And it had taken her body. Offered her what she dreamed of most in the world and taken her body in payment.

Fury lent her enough control to shout, “No!”, but it was the faint and feeble shout of dreaming. The ista-sattva’s face descended to hers, and a familiar whiplash danced up her spine, throwing her out of the familiar world.

The girl opened her eyes to green. An ancient forest surrounded her, huge trunks looming far into the reaches of the sky. The forest was cool and dim, and the canopy shielded the sky entirely from view. She was lying flat on her back, staring upward, on a spread of emerald-green moss. Around her, the forest sprawled in silence.

Slowly, she sat up, honey-dark hair falling around her face in tousled curls. One slender hand brushed the hair out of her dark eyes, and she stopped and looked at it as if she had never seen it before.

Fear never occurred to her. The world was fresh and new, and so was she. Scrambling to her feet, she became facsinated by the folds of the dark tunic falling around her knees, discovering a fringed and brightly coloured belt looped around her waist. The colours reminded her of something, and she strugled briefly to bring it into focus, uselessly.

A slight breeze distracted her, and she glanced out into the forest. A brilliantly blue bird fluttered nearby, down to a gentle landing on a low branch. Its bright eyes fixed on her, and it cocked its head at her. The girl smiled at it, and, moved by some faint memory, held out a hand.

The bird cocked its head from side to side. “Am I supposed to land on that?”

She blinked at it. “I … I think so.”

It flipped its wings a little, and hopped along the branch, which bounced slightly. A leaf drifted to the forest floor. “I think not.”

The girl brought her hand back, holding it before her face and examining it minutely. Long, tapering fingers waggled to her command, and she smiled, then laughed carelessly. Putting her arms out, she spun in mad circles, her clear laughter spiralling to the skies.

“What are you doing?”

She stopped, laughter cut off into silence. “I don’t know.”

The bird tipped its head back and forth at her again, then launched itself off the branch and circled her a few times. “What do you know?”

“I’m here.” A slight frown crossed her pretty face, almost immediately banished. “Who are you?”

“No one of consequence. Who are you?”

“I …”

Nothing. Silence filled the forest.

“Are you a subject of the king?” the bird pressed.

“The king?” The girl crouched on the ground, frowning more heavily now, hands pressed to the sides of her head. A stronger wind tossed her curls around her face.

“What is your name?”

“My name? My name.” Her eyes filled with tears, turning them into limpid pools as she gazed up at her feathered tormentor. “I’ve lost my name.”

The bird sighed, fluffing its feathers. “You shouldn’t be here, miss.”

“Where should I be?” Her voice was nearly a wail now, and great tear-drops spilled down her face.

“Oh, lady, please don’t cry.” The bird sounded exactly like a worried and confused young man now, and the girl gulped. “Look, I’ll give you a bit of advice. You’re not a subject of the king, and he isn’t likely to help your kind anyway. This is his forest, though, and I should get out as soon as I could, if I were you. You’re wanting to get home, of course.”

“I don’t know where home is,” she whispered.

“No. No, of course not. You don’t even have your name anymore, why would you have that? No. You need to go see [witch] the Sorceress. Yes.” It bobbed its head up and down.

“[witch] the Sorceress? Will she help me find my way?” The girl smeared her tears away with both hands, still crouching on the ground but looking up at the bird.

“You have to find your own way, lady. But the Sorceress can help.” The bird launched off the branch, beginning a climb into the canopy and the sky beyond. “I will do one more thing for you, lady. I’ll lend you a name. Until you regain your own, be Parivrit.” The voice faded into the heights. “But be wary who you give it to, lady!”

Parivrit. She nodded. It was a good sounding name. Suited to the wanderer she was apparently reborn as now.

Now, get out of the forest. Find the Sorceress, the bird had said. Parivrit dusted her hands off briskly, the movement causing rolling echoes of memory, and set off through the trees.

The light under the canopy had become perceptibly darker, but there seemed no end to the trees. Parivrit had found several glades where the sunlight broke through the treetops to dapple the leaf-strewn forest floor, but everywhere she looked the trees extended endlessly. She wasn’t even sure if she was walking a straight line; for all she knew she was wandering in circles and would do so forever.

There was no way to get her bearings in this dim, silent hall of trees, and even what little help she could gain from travelling in the direction it seemed the sunlight was coming from would vanish with the sun soon. She wished she’d thought to ask for just a bit more assistance from the bird.

Parivrit stopped beside a gigantic, towering pine, resting her hand and forehead against the rough bark. “If I ask for help, will anyone hear me?” she murmured.

“I would,” something whispered in her ear, and she startled backward. A sweetly smiling, sharp-angled little face emerged from the trunk of the tree, deep green eyes fixed on her. Parivrit fell back a few steps, and a tiny, slim figure emerged from the bark, following her. “I would help you, if you asked. Would you give me anything in return?”

“I have nothing,” Parivrit stammered, fighting the urge to bend down to the child-size girl-shape. The small girl came up to her, grasping the edge of her tunic.

“I will hold your favour until I need it, and help you now.” The eyes were large and limpid, and a cloud of waving, colour-changing hair surrounded the earnest, sharp-boned little face. “Swear to me you will help when I ask, and I will help you.”

Parivrit stared down, unsure of what to say. Of course, there would have to be a trade of favours, if she had nothing else to give. But what could she do for this creature that walked out of trees? “I don’t know what I could ever do,” she said at last, “but since you answered my call, and I was told to get out of the forest and seek the Sorceress, I will do as you ask. When you call me, I will do your favour.”

“No,” Calixte was calm, so calm she would have been terrified of it as an observer. This king could obliterate her with a thought, from all she had seen.

But she would not prostitute her talent to him. Not to any of them.

Never again. To the ista-sattva, she had given the unspoken consent of the uninformed, but now she knew what they needed from her. The price of that glory of creativity was her very self, and the sea would swallow her world whole before she gave the keys to her soul over to another again.

“No?” The king’s voice spiralled upward in shocked query, driving her to her knees.

“Calixte, I hold you in the palm of my hand.”

The court whispered in stunned disbelief and admiration. A brightness loomed at her side, and a hand assisted her to her feet.

“You defy me, [name1]? Over a mere human chit of a girl?” The king looked sorrowful, and Calixte fully expected to be bowed down by that sorrow, as she had borne the weight of every other emotion. Yet strangely, she felt nothing. That eerie calm enveloped her again as a shield. Or perhaps [name]’s proximity guarded her.

“Why?”

[name] shrugged. “Because it amuses me, my lord. Why else?”

“Indeed.” Around them, the lords and ladies of the court tittered. “She will paint for me. Or …” The king leaned back – lounged, even – and steepled his fingers. “Or I will make her as one of our own, with face and form fairer far than any goddess, and send her back to Atlantis.” A wide smile exposed pointed teeth, and Calixte shuddered.

A roar of approval greeted this pronouncement.

Calixte frowned. “For what purpose?” she asked, and her voice fell into a sudden clear silence. Feral smiles greeted her from all sides.

“You will bring Atlantis to us.”

Horror laced its way up Calixte’s spine. Lands the Folk possessed vanished from the memory of man, spoken of only in legend and whisper. Bad enough to draw the attention of a member of the Folk to oneself, a circumstance occasionally difficult to avoid. Worse still all the Folk. Yet worst of all to draw the attention of the Folk to one’s whole people, shaped into an instrument of destruction.

“No!” she cried out, not in anguish but in fury. “I am no play toy, and I will not be so used!”

“Defiance, again,” the king hissed, and somehow he was in her face, and whatever protection [name] had provided was gone, no more than a mist around her mind,. The king’s fury scorched her, but somewhere she found a strength to stand up to him.

“Who are you, puny human, weak girl, to defy the king of the Folk? You who could not even resist one of the weakest of my subjects.”

“Calixte of Atlantis,” she flung back, “and I take back my name.”

Dead, sudden, crushing silence. The glittering hall might have been empty of [description] for all the reaction her declaration received. She forced herself to take a step forward, and the king fell back. “I take back my name,” Calixte repeated.

Third time pays for all.

She shouted, directly into the king’s expressionless face, “I take back my name!”

“Seriously, it was like you were in another world.” Ishan laid back against the rocks and watched her intently.

Calixte’s blush grew hotter. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Sure, you can avoid discussing your sudden outburst of strange behaviour.”

She bit her lip. Ishan had never questioned her about her methodology before. Now suddenly he thought he knew about the pressures of a new idea, a new vision? He thought he had anything valid to say about artistry? “You’ve never touched a brush in your life, so just shut up.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t know anything about art, you don’t know anything about creativity, you’re a lazy, useless, greedy rich family’s son who will never amount to anything! You haven’t done anything with your life compared to me! What do you know about how hard it is to have this idea in your mind, this feeling, images and sensations and thoughts and not be able to make other people see it the way you do? It’s so hard, I just want people to understand, I just want them to see what I see and so if I get very caught up in trying to put it down, make it real, and it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work I don’t see how that’s any of your business at all!” Somehow Calixte was on her feet, shouting and crying and gesturing, filled with a rage so powerful it overwhelmed all rationality, she didn’t know where it had come from. She’d never felt anything like this before – Ishan had never questioned her art before.

He had never questioned anything about her before. He was just always there, from her earliest memories, a part of her life. They had played together as babies, they had shared lessons together, laughed together at her earliest suitors. No good memory she had was absent Ishan, at least in the background. Temple dances, rites of passage, first thises and thats. This circle of trees was their special place, where up until today no one else had ever come.

She wound down, running out of words, shaking with fists clenched and looking at the empty space against the rock where Ishan had been leaning. Now he was gone. What had she said? What /had/ she said? She could barely remember, so angry and incoherent had been the stream of verbiage that had tumbled out of her mouth.

Her eyes were drawn to the basket of artistic supplies. A blank corner stuck up out of the rest of the materials, seeming to beckon to her. Slowly, dazedly, she knelt down, forgetting about Ishan, forgetting about inexplicable anger, and drew the paper out. A pencil next, her board; the images swept up and whirled her off into a silent world of expression.

This time, oh glory, this time the pencil obeyed her desire, every line was perfect; from chiaroscuro to colour she sketched, painted, shaped, molded every vision, every thought, until the ground around her was littered with brilliantly coloured, fantastically shaped, superbly accurate replications of virtually everything around her and at least half of the delirium-flavoured images she’d experienced before.

Looming darkness interrupted her frenzy of creativity. She emerged from her oblivion to discover her nose nearly touching the paper, a throbbing headache beginning behind her eyes, and supplies scattered around the grove like the petals at a wedding ritual. Her fingers felt cramped and numb, and the rest of her felt drained.

Calixte staggered up, balancing one hand against the rock, cooling now absent the day’s light. A whoosh sounded in her ears, and she closed her eyes against an onslaught of dizziness. Where had the day gone? Surely it had not been that late when … when what? Most of the day seemed to be obliterated from her memory. She had met someone, someone new, something wonderful … gone. Exhausted, she gave up the struggle with her mind and bent to the task of gathering paints, papers, and pencils back into her basket.

Disgusted with herself, with the day, with everything, she made her way back over the hills into the city, creeping into her home courtyard with a rush of relief. The lack of candlelight, in comparison to other cots around hers, was profoundly depressing. Ignoring everything, she made her way to her bed and fell into it, collapsing almost immediately into sleep.

A tapping at the door brought Calixte back to the surface of reality with a jolt. What time was it? What /day/ was it? She dropped her paintbrush, smearing her hands over her face, and stumbled to the door. Opened it a crack. “Yes?”

The [insert title here] stood poised neatly in her courtyard, looking slightly surprised. “I thought you were to attend the [insert other title here]’s dinner as my companion tonight. Is this no longer so?”

She stared at him numbly, trying to pull her wits together and conceive how so much time could have passed. Surely she hadn’t somehow lost four days! Something seemed to go ’sproing!’ in the back of her mind, and she straightened up and opened the door wide. A deep bow, accompanied by the sweep of an arm, ushered the [insert title here] into her house.

“Please, be seated, sir,” Calixte said, ignoring her personal disarray and trying to behave as if everything was as planned. “My deepest apologies for this delay.” She offered wine, contained in a cup of porcelain so fine the plum-red shade of the liquid inside darkened the cup. “Please allow me to prepare.”

Without waiting for any sort of response, she offered another slight bow and backed into her private rooms, pushing the beaded curtain aside with a sigh. Of what, she wasn’t sure. Relief? Terror? Concern?

It didn’t matter. What mattered was remedying the results of several days’ apparent inattention to anything at all outside the world of the paints. Whatever had happened to her, and whatever the results were – she yearned to look in her workroom, just to see what, if anything, she had produced – right now she had to practise her other craft with all the art she possessed, and hope that whatever spirit had possessed her with regard to the art of the paintbrush would continue to attend her now.

Kohl for the eyes, ochre for the lips and cheeks, brush the hair until it shone – flatter this man by applying horrendously expensive violet pigment to her eyelids – Calixte made herself up in measured haste. Thought her heart pounded in her ears with its violent reminder of how much insult she had dealt this man, her hands remained steady. Accidents happened. A woman living virtually alone, under some circumstances, could be forgiven for a slight lack of preparation. [this is bullshit do something about it]

Calixte’s hands trembled with exhaustion. She knew from her brief glance in the polished plate last night that she would not need to apply kohl to her eyes until the circles beneath faded. She wasn’t sleeping properly, obviously, or enough, or eating enough, and hadn’t emerged from her house in days. The images and sensations in her mind demanded more and more of her time and skill to express, and she had passed long ago the moment when she could have stopped.

Canvases lined the walls of her studio, blocking the murals and sketches that had formerly blazed from those walls. She had briefly considered having someone in to re-plaster the walls, to provide her with a fresh surface over the scribbles, but that intention had vanished under a fresh onslaught of imagery, and she had gone back to her worktable and forgotten about it completely.

How long ago had that been? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the colours, the pictures forming under her fingertips, the expression of the wild palette in her mind. Another painting stacked against the wall. Melted lumps of candle wax dotted the floor, in a pattern that at any other time would have horrified her, flames wavering terrifyingly near to half-dried pigment and older paintings. New candles had simply been stuck on top of the soft wax of the old and lit, and dozens of them surrounded her worktable, filling the room with heat and wavering light.

Her hair was stiff with clots of pigments, as were her garments, yet she didn’t notice any longer. Nothing mattered but the painting. Nothing mattered but the expression.

So lost was she, so drained was she, the fact of another living person in a room she’d striven to keep others out of went unnoticed for long moments. Only the completion of another artwork broke the spell, and that only briefly, as she glanced up long enough to place the painting out of the way and find a new blank canvas on which to work.

This time, she glanced up and met Ista-sattva’s depthless, flat eyes.

It was like meeting a wall, head-on. There was no jolt this time, no wild slurry of impressions and sensations, just a stop, the abrupt removal of every bit of mental forward motion.

She stopped.

He? She? Calixte had not been able to tell the first time, and hazy memories of further meetings, entranced and abandoned couplings of the spirit, rose to the surface of her thoughts – they provided no answer. It crossed the room to her, apparently drifting between, or over, or on the debris which littered the floor. Every work of art in the room seemed dull and flat compared to Ista-sattva’s reality moving through that room, no matter how lifelike or truthful.

When its fingers touched her chin, bringing her head up and forcing her gaze to stay trapped to its, Calixte ceased to breathe. Every nerve seemed to be concentrated on that one point of contact, rendering the sense with awful clarity.

It blinked, once, and Calixte felt she was standing outside herself, watching with ancient detachment as its face bent toward hers. An appalling knowledge began to seep through her.

This – all of this, the blazing and pure passion of artistry that had swept through her as well as the neglect of everything /save/ that artistry – was due to that being which even now seemed to be ripping the last of her from herself.

What had it done to her? The flame of creativity, yes, she would do nearly anything to keep that outpouring of ideas and the ability to set them down with clarity. But pure, hard experience, experience she was just now recognizing, made it terrifyingly clear that ‘anything’ included any number of things she would not, in fact, do, and one of them seemed to be occurring – had been occurring – right now.

“Stop!” she shouted – tried to shout. Helplessly, she realised, under the onslaught of other realizations, that her body was no longer hers to control. Might not have been hers to control for some time.

It wasn’t long before the only sounds were the flop flop of her sandals hitting the dry ground, superimposed over distant wildlife noises. Even the summer wind had fallen to nothing in the tiny valleys cupped between [land]’s central hills. In these more sheltered spots, scattered groves of pine, cypress, or oak flourished, guarding miniature pools of brilliant wildflowers. Nearer to the sea, Calixte knew, the trees became more palms and olives, flourishing in the salt-heavy spray that deformed other varieties. But here, deep in the gentle hills, less hardy types flaunted their colours.

The sun neared its zenith before Calixte reached the rocky feet of the mountains that marked her destination. Though the flora did not become true forest, more and more trees threw their shade over the grassy slopes or thrust their roots deep beneath the rocks. A near-perfect circle of mighty oaks enclosed a tiny pool of leaf-dim water, barely drinkable but flashing in the high sun.

Grateful for the shade, Calixte dropped to her knees beside the mere. She dipped her hands in the water, wincing slightly at the chill, and sprinkled a few droplets at the base of the goddess-statue enshrined at the foot of the stone outcropping that thrust its way between the trees. She closed her eyes, pursuing stillness in her soul, and formed a brief, heartfelt prayer in the centre of that silence.

“You do not belong here.”

To her dying day, Calixte would never know how she came not to start, or shriek in terror, or gibber with shock. The voice was smooth and rich, high and pure and aurally redolent of contempt. It was the sort of voice that sounded as if it ought to be commanding the hearer to grovel and beg at their feet, surrounded by slave boys waving palm fronds and offering grapes and date wine, the way she imagined the pharaoh of [land2] might sound after her father’s stories of his court.

The way some of her most frustrating suitors had sounded when speaking of her artistry.

Dismissive.

She hoped she hadn’t given any reaction at all. Slowly, with all the grace she could muster, she rose to her feet. Calixte swept loose strands of hair out of her face with her fingertips, in a gesture she’d seen the hetaerai use countless times while painting expensive courtyards, and twisted slowly to face the speaker.

Darkness.

Her first impression was darkness. Shadows, a moonless night, the farthest depths of an ancient forest. A place where everything carried a razor-sharp edge and even safe steps cut you.

Beneath that, dull sensory impressions of height, lazy grace, perfect stillness; eyes like bits of heaving sea cut out and pasted into a face the shade of raw umber, surmounted by a shock of wild, stiff, terra cotta hair. Enveloping strips of what looked like little more than rags of some fine fabric simultaneously revealed and concealed everything, forming an all-encompassing cloud of mobile shadow. A thundercloud come to earth.

The imagery ripped through her mind with the force of [god]’s thunderbolt, nearly jerking her to her knees. Calixte staggered, arms flailing outward, and smashed into the sudden, enclosing grasp. Looking up and properly meeting the eyes for the first time in the brief encounter, she was crushed sideways into an entirely different world of sensation – the sound-sucking stillness beneath the waves as rippling, flowing shapes drifted by in prismatically sharp beams of light rendered wavery by depth.

Fingers gripping like claws into her arms brought her to the surface of the induced sensation. She swallowed harshly. “Let go.”

Prompt, abrupt freedom. Mad, disconnected images still lanced the swollen landscape of her creativity. She shook her head, once, twice, groping after clarity. The idea – clarity – jerked to mind a whole new sequence of visions; crystalline structures of insane towers slashing ribbons out of pristine skies, sharp-edged rainbows blazing across sere landscapes …

She thought she felt the hands upon her shoulders again, holding her upright as sensation cracked her spine like a whiplash, and that voice, caressing now like the thinnest of mist linen, whispering in her ear, “You are mine now.”

Dazed, every sense still throbbing from the onslaught of impressions, Calixte managed to gasp out, “Who are you?” What are you, she wanted to say, certain that some mad god had unreasonably chosen her for visitations of delirium. Already her fingers itched for paper, for paints, for haste and time in which to attempt the captivity of at least a few of the abandoned images that had gone shrieking like dying women across her soul.

Nothing she could ever do would compare to what she had seen, smelt, tasted, touched, heard; no quality of art or craft would encapsulate those sensations – she had to try.

The face, sharp planes, bones and angles, thrust before hers again. “Calixte.” Her name, in that voice that rang shivers through her eardrums, fading jangles of finger-cymbals. “I am ista-sattva.”

And everything fell away.

The world came back, soft-edged and still, a light breeze gently swirling the edge of her wrap. The high-definition cacophony of sensory impressions faded to nothing, and she whimpered slightly, empty from the loss of it, empty from the repudiation of it.

“Hush,” the sibliant hissed in her ears. She became aware that she was standing alone, that the figure – Ista-sattva? — was standing beside the shrine some feet away, she outside the circle of trees; when? How?

Stumbling, her legs unwilling to obey her, she flung herself toward the shrine, toward the figure, helplessly watching as somehow, some way, it vanished inside the rock, leaving nothing behind but a wild memory.

“Calixte?”

This time she did shriek, tripping over a trailing hem of her wrap in stark terror. Warm hands, familiar hands, Ishan’s hands helped her to her feet. She clung to him, unashamedly glad of another definably human presence.

“What’s wrong?”

Calixte shook her head, unable to find words for the experience. One deep breath, two – she forced herself to let go of Ishan and took a step back. “Nothing,” she lied hastily, faced with his expression of patent disbelief. “We didn’t meet in the city so I didn’t expect you.”

“I was detained.” Ishan, too, carried a wickerwork basket, neatly covered with linen and slung over one shoulder for ease of transport. Unslinging it, he opened the linen cover and began to unpack a veritable feast, spreading the items out on the convenient shelf of rock they had used for that purpose many times before. Calixte fetched her own basket and laid out her brushes and pigments with a distant air.

Taking up a scrap of paper, she attempted to scribble a sketch of the many-towered crystal palace she’d seen, adding increasingly smaller refinements to the lineaments. Forgetting everything else, she bent over the papers, sketching and discarding in growing frustration. Each iteration seemed to be farther from the pure, sharp-edged vision she’d been shown, and the need to capture at least some small portion of those sensations became stronger with every page she tossed aside.

A nut-brown hand came down over the paper she had just set pencil to, and she hissed with annoyance. “Stop.”

She put the pencil to the paper again, and it was removed from her hands. “Calixte, stop.”

Ishan. Ishan was speaking to her.

“Calixte, you need to eat. Have you eaten all day?”

Mutely, she shook her head.

“Put the board down. Put the paper down.” Ishan laid a packet of bread stuffed with olives on her makeshift table, covering over her last abortive attempt. “I’ve never seen you like that.”

“I have to capture it,” she mumbled through the crumbs, now aware of the griping emptiness of her belly. “Before it gets away.”

“You were having an astounding lack of success.” Ishan scooped up a handful of discards from the ground where they lay scattered like so many fallen leaves. Lowering sunlight turned the pages to a shade of thick cream, bringing the hesitant lines out in stark contrast.

Calixte flung herself to the ground beneath the largest of the cypress trees in the temple groves, sweeping up a handful of fallen leaves and beginning to crumble them. Pigments stained her fingers and clothes, evidence of long hours of work. A smear of bright red altered the apparent arc of one eyebrow, lending her a much more whimsical expression. The fading beams of the sun burnished her honey-dark curls and glittered off the strands waving in the wind.

An anonymous figure, a dark silhouette against the light, clambered up the slope to collapse at Calixte’s feet. Shading her dark eyes from the light, she smiled down into the face of her best friend in all the world, and extended a hand for a friendly clasp. Maris squeezed once, flashing a wide, white smile in the dusky tan of his face, and pulled himself onto the brick ledge fencing the huge tree around.

“Good day?” he asked laconically, planting his hands on her shoulders and beginning to massage.

Calixte wove a freed lock of hair through her fingers and said, “Good day. I finished [god]’s mural and took two more offers for consideration and sketches. Thankfully they aren’t murals; I want to do something different for a while.”

“You want to leave.”

She shrugged uncomfortably. “I want to be free.”

“Freedom is an illusion.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about it,” she riposted mildly.

“We could run off into the hills.”

“I’m supposed to paint out there?” He hit a particularly stiff spot and she winced.

“Sorry.”

“We could just run off for one day. Tomorrow’s a holiday.” Calixte craned her head backward to look Maris in the eye.

“No painting.”

“Alright.” It was odd, she thought, that no matter how verbose she was with anyone else (and gods knew when she fought with her mother the vocabulary flew thick and fast), with Maris she invariably adopted his laconic mode of speaking immediately. Movement became laconic too, each motion just enough and no more – well, maybe that was from painting, where a tiny jerk could become the mistake that would ruin an entire vision.

Every mistake, every ruined painting, every failed vision seared her soul. She longed to find a way to perfectly express everything she could envision, somehow encapsulating the wild landscape of her mind in pigment, or motion, or language. She did not paint for fame; fame was hers without trying. Her mother took pains to impress upon her the notoriety that was hers for possessing a glory of honey-dark hair, depthless shadowed eyes, and the shape of a goddess – word of the girl who could make the goddess of beauty jealous had been rippling out from [city] for years, had probably been carried by men who knew her, knew her father, to lands beyond the circling seas.

Suitors these days as often as not brought an interpreter along to speak with her family, though such men equally often were revolted by her artistic talent. Calixte sometimes tried to imagine the lands such men must come from, where they believed a woman must only be ornamental. What use was such a woman to the family? Women led; it was from women that new generations were born. Artisans were honoured; Calixte’s choice was only hemmed in because she was not born to this land. Daughters belonged to their mothers, and her mother (oh, to meet her long-lost bodymother) had bought Calixte for one reason and one reason only: to give to a temple when she came of such an age. The temples held the highest power in the land; the women there wielded the rituals that gave health and life to the land and kept the raging winter seas from drowning the fragile earth.

A daughter in the temples gave a woman power – but Calixte’s artistic talent was undeniable. Art – song, dance, drama, poetry, painting – was also sacred, and she or he who possessed such a gift from the goddesses dared not deny it. Not that Calixte ever wanted to. She sought eagerly, every day, every hour, for new ways to limn the visions that sprang to her fingertips.

Not for her the temple precincts and sacred rituals of the gods, save only with brush or scroll in hand.

Art was power too.

Calixte woke to tears. At least, the pillow was damp with fading trails, a vanishment as unstoppable as dream. Was it a dream? The huge arcing wave, so tall as to seem not water but wall? The fragments of imagery faded before she could grasp them into words, leaving behind only vague fear and a frown.

Weak fingers of sunlight streamed through the horn-paned windows, casting a dim glow over the creamy walls. Faint leaf shadows wavered, mimicking the motion of light in water. The wavering shadows lent an eerie verisimilitude to the artwork covering much of the walls – one wall featured a single gigantic mural of the sky-goddess, [goddess], limbs and garments whirling in the ceremonial dance Dawn Breaks. The wall immediately adjacent depicted a series of sea life vignettes entirely appropriate to [city]’s ties of the sea.

Perhaps that was the source of the dream; naught but pico-flashes of her own artwork twisted into recognizability. Calixte made a mental note to stop eating honey cakes before sleeping, and threw the linen cover off, swinging her legs to the floor. Curls of honey-dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she stretched to the floor, one hand sweeping up yesterday’s tunic from its careless location. Shrugging the light wool into place over her shoulders, she padded across the limestone floor to the bathing room.

No sooner had she poured the contents of a pottery jar over her head, plastering the pale tunic to her body, than the sharp voice of her mother came through the archway. “Calixte?”

“I’m bathing,” Calixte snapped in return, sweeping her fingers through the soap and stripping the drenched tunic off over her head.

The large, buxom figure of her mother darkened the arch, cutting off all light from Calixte’s sleeping room. She didn’t say anything, merely watched her daughter smear lather through her waist-length hair. The extra water-weight pulled the heavy mass to her hips. A slight frown darkened Nitsa’s expression, but she merely tapped one hand against the wall and left.

Calixte breathed a sigh of relief and knelt on the floor before upending another jar over her head. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut against the suds as they streamed down in the cool water. The appearance of her mother meant, most likely, that there had been another offer, and Calixte would have to contrive yet another clever excuse to escape the increasing stream of suitors. Wrapping her hair in a length of dark wool, she pursed her lips and sorted through excuses.

At her age, only a foreign fool would believe she was too young for marriage, or that she’d been promised to a temple. Lies were increasingly harder to conceal from her mother, as well, though fortunately her father doted on his only daughter and therefore was more than inclined to allow her her headstrong way when it came to the patterns of her future. She might possibly be able to get away with the prophecy dodge, depending on how credulous or religious today’s suitor was.

She wound a sheet of linen so fine it was translucent around her body and hastily pinned her curls up off her neck, thrusting a verdigrised copper stick through the knot; no one with sense wore their hair down in the heat of a [city] summer day. Perhaps it was time to begin heavily hinting at an interest in girls. Surely no family would willingly allow their son to go into a family with little hope of offspring.

Even for the most beautiful girl in [land].

Calixte, the girl artist of [land], kilted her drapes up to her calves and snatched up a wicker basket full of brushes, pencils, paper,and pigments, slipping through the dim rooms of her family’s modest house and out into the street. Of course, the best way to deal with suitors was not to meet them at all. Every commission she took earned her more money, and every silver she made brought her closer to escaping her parents’ house for good.

And escaping her parents’ house was everything right now.

Once free of them, they who were not her birth parents and cared nothing for her (she made a ward against wickedness with one hand, thinking briefly of her father) – once free, she could go anywhere. Trade on her beauty, trade on her intelligence, trade on her artistry – anywhere she wanted to go would be open to her. Hence, a bargain with her mother, who had wanted entrée into the temples and gotten what must have seemed a changeling child.

Calixte would buy herself free.

She searched the agora eagerly for Maris’ dark face and tall, slim form, to no avail. If she didn’t find him soon, the rituals and pageantry of the holiday would sweep her up as the priestesses and priests passed through the streets and alleyways, on their way to the harbour. An hour past the dance of Dawn Breaks, she shrugged her shoulders. Giving five silvers to a stall keeper about to close up shop, she filled the top of her basket with bread, honey, and fruit, and slipped through the narrow streets to the wild hills beyond the city.